"To attempt to silence a man is to pay him homage, for it is an acknowledgement that his arguments are both impossible to answer and impossible to ignore." —JBR Yant

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Electing a New People

VDARE.com’s Peter Brimelow and “Electing a New People”

Edmund Connelly

April 8, 2009

John Derbyshire has rather pointedly described the fate of those who would criticize Jews in a remarkable exchange with Joey Kurtzman, a Jewish editor of the website Jewcy.com:

So far as the consequences of ticking off Jews are concerned: ... I was makingparticular reference to respectable rightwing journalism, most especially in theU.S. I can absolutely assure you that anyone who made general, mildly negative,remarks about Jews would NOT — not ever again — be published in the Wall StreetJournal opinion pages, The Weekly Standard, National Review, The New York Sun,The New York Post, or The Washington Times. I know the actual people, theeditors, involved here, and I can assert this confidently.

I thought about this when reading Peter Brimelow’s speech at Michael Hart’s Preserving Western Civilization conference in early February. Brimelow runs the excellent racial realism site VDARE.com, an immigration reform site that champions the interests of the American majority — European-Americans.

For this, Brimelow and his writers have drawn the wrath of the mainstream and liberal left, particularly the SPLC — routinely referred to as the $PLC at VDARE. [Editorial note: TOO announces that from now on it will shamelessly copy this wonderfully accurate designation.)

He has also been shunned by mainstream conservative publications such as National Review where he was once Senior Editor. Jonah Goldberg, (jew)who personifies the changing of the guard at NR after Brimelow left, referred to Brimelow as "a once-respected conservative voice.” As Brimelow notes, NR is "a once-conservative, now respected, magazine." I'm sure that the $PLC couldn't be happier that Jonah Goldberg and his ilk are ensconced at NR.

Brimelow introduces the problem he sees the West facing, delivered in the form of an observation followed by a question:

This is a problem which we see throughout the Western world—an unprecedentedly huge influx of non-traditional immigration. The result of this is that every major Western nation will be a minority in its homeland the foreseeable future. It takes less time in some places and more time in others, but the calculations can easily be made. . . .

What's so amazing about this transformation is that it has no economic benefit for the traditional people of the Western nations that are voluntarily giving up their identity — and their political power. As Brimelow phrases it, the question then becomes "Why are these countries doing this to themselves if they are not benefiting their native-born — their own people?”

We at TOO have little doubt about the main force behind these transformations: The organized Jewish community. These transformations have nothing to do with economics but everything to do with ethnic activism and identity politics.

There are hints of this in Brimelow's talk, although it was probably impolitic for him to mention it given the strong participation of Jews at the conference. As noted by The Searchlight (an $PLC-like outfit in the UK that is now running a “Hope not hate” campaign against the BNP), the conference was “an attempt to create a new ideological pole friendlier to Jewish participation, but within the broader white nationalist movement. They would bind Islamophobia and nativism with scientific racism.” Not quite the way I’d say it, but you get the idea.

Brimelow points to the growing Jewish support for Democratic politics in America — despite their relative prosperity. Jews are an economic elite but their voting patterns much more resemble non-white minorities — they “earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans,” as Milton Himmelfarb phrased it.

Indeed, Brimelow notes that higher percentages of Jews voted for Obama than the average for other minorities (83% to 79%). Why this is so “is a good question and in some ways the most important question in the immigration debate. And I recommend it to you for further discussion.”

Never one to pass up an invitation like that, I would point out that from the time they came to the US in large numbers, Jews have had a very negative view of traditional Americans and their culture. As Elliott Abrams put it, the mainstream Jewish community “clings to what is at bottom a dark vision of America, as a land permeated with anti-Semitism and always on the verge of anti-Semitic outbursts.” As portrayed by the Jewish media, “Western civilization is ... a failing, dying culture, but at worst it is ... sick and evil compared to other cultures.” It's all about identity politics.

Brimelow gets right down to brass tacks about one side of the equation—he discusses and defends the interests of whites.

Obama doesn’t have 43% of his appointees white Protestants, in fact I don’t think even 4% are white Protestants. So you have to ask yourself what’s going on here. How can the founding stock of the country have so completely lost control? They could reasonably regard the Obama administration as kind of an occupation government: a coalition of united minorities that succeeded in uniting the minorities and dividing the majority.

As fate would have it, this observation resonated with something I had just read about the way Bolsheviks had assumed power in 1917 at the beginning of the Soviet era. A shadowy Executive Committee ruled, and among those with power “more than half were Jewish socialists.” Native Russians did not even make up a quarter. One participant noted that “the most striking thing about the composition of the EC was the number of foreign elements.” The deaths of tens of millions of underrepresented white non-Jews followed. (The details of this genocide come from Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s two-volume study of Russian-Jewish relations, Two Hundred Years Together. Still lacking an English translation after seven years, Occidental Quarterly contributor F. Roger Devlin has worked from the French translation to provide a superb overview of Solzhenitsyn’s work. See The Occidental Quarterly Fall 2008 and Winter 2008-2009. Order here.)

Brimelow offered further room for discussion when last month he published Kevin MacDonald’s VDARE.com piece Memories Of Madison—My Life In The New Left. There MacDonald reiterated his argument that radical Jews of the 1960s “had destructive fantasies in which the revolution would result in ‘humiliation, dispossession, imprisonment or execution of the oppressors.’“

In particular, the dispossession component is being accomplished by support for massive non-traditional immigration. MacDonald argued that “Jewish activism on behalf of non-white immigration can be directly traced back to Jewish activists on the left.” Indeed, “Massive non-white immigration into Western societies has been a project of the Jewish left for pretty much the entire last century. The Jewish left has been the most influential component of the organized Jewish community. And even when a significant number of Jews defected from the left, giving rise to the neoconservative movement, they retained the traditional Jewish attitudes on immigration.” (Read MacDonald’s chapter on this phenomenon here).

As with Solzhenitsyn above, MacDonald connected such displacement of a native population with the genocide that occurred in the 1920s and 1930s in the Soviet Union. After the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, “Jewish radicals were able to actually carry out in the USSR the fantasies of the New Left Jewish radicals in the US—i.e., the ‘humiliation, dispossession, imprisonment or execution of the oppressors.’”

MacDonald is proposing that a substantial component of the Jewish activism in the area of immigration is motivated by aggressive hostility toward the European American majority. Another, more defensive explanation of why Jews have led immigration reform movements that favor non-whites is the belief that a less homogeneously white America will be less likely to give rise to a powerful anti-Semitic movement. In an oft-cited passage, Jewish activist Earl Raab wrote:

The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country.

We [Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible— and makes our constitutional constraints against bigotry more practical than ever.

It seems likely that Raab’s wish to protect Jews is assured. After all, Jews are now famously dominant in media, government, academia and finance (for better or for worse).

Meanwhile, the rest of us Americans are left with many of the less pleasant aspects of diversity and non-white immigration, as last weekend’s news yet again drove home. As reported by CNN, a man wearing body armor used his car to block the rear door of an immigration services center, then entered the building and proceeded to murder thirteen people. “A federal law enforcement source identified the suspected gunman as Jiverly Wong. [The spokesman] said Wong, who was from Vietnam, was 41 and had changed his last name to Voong.”

I’m sure I’m not the only one who breathed a sigh of relief when it turned out that the shooter was not a white male. As VDARE’s Steve Sailer explained, “You can imagine how the Mainstream Media was itching to start typing denunciations of hate-filled white male anti-immigration rednecks when the news came in today that 13 people had been shot dead at an immigration center.” Brimelow is even more pointed on this issue: “If the killer in the Binghamton immigration center massacre had been a white American, I have no doubt that much of the VDARE.COM Editorial Collective would be in police custody right now.”

What has thus far been left unexplained is why there is any immigration to a region that has been devastated economically since at least the 1970s. Even the New York Times recognized this in a story about an area where “the number of 25-to-34-year-old residents in the 52 counties north of Rockland and Putnam declined by more than 25 percent. In 13 counties that include cities like Buffalo, Syracuse and Binghamton, the population of young adults fell by more than 30 percent.” In a perverse side note, The Times adds that “population growth upstate might have lagged even more but for the influx of 21,000 prison inmates, who accounted for 30 percent of new residents.” Is this the kind of place that needs legions of new immigrants?

VDARE.com’s Brenda Walker today made the broader point clear:

The problem of rampaging immigrants is not guns or unfriendly Americans or conservative radio programs or VDARE.com. The problem is the strangely persistent myth among elites and the media that millions from Somalia and Iraq and Red China can be plunked into our unique society and be expected to get along like they were putting on a different coat. . . . Immigration as a marker of the imaginary one-worlder multicultural paradise has been a screaming failure. The symptoms are everywhere, from ethnic gangs to mass murder.

Someday someone might look into this phenomenon, for it seems to fit the pattern of dispossession of traditional Americans. According to one blog, the US State Department has adopted a policy to spread refugees out to small and middle-sized American cities and away from the traditional “gateway cities.” Research found that “eleven top cities that had the largest refugee populations as a percentage of the foreign born in the city” were:

Utica-Rome, NY

Fargo-Moorhead, ND-MN

Erie, PA

Binghamton, NY

Spokane, WA

Portland, ME

Lincoln, NE

Waterloo-Cedar Falls, IA

Burlington, VT

Manchester, NH

Des Moines, IA

Odd that all eleven of these cities are overwhelmingly white gentile locales.

When considering this crazy jumble of immigration situations I’ve described, casual observers may mutter that the system sure seems to be broken. But as I’ve stressed before, the problem is not that the system is broken; rather, the problem is that it is working as intended. Whereas Ms. Walker notes that “a homogenous nation evokes loyalty, stability and harmony,” the sad fact is that Jews in general detest these qualities in others. For Jews, homogeneous masses of white people reminds them of marching storm troopers with swastikas on their uniforms. As I wrote last year, "Jews instinctively fear and feel threatened by nationalistic, particularistic societies."

To me the lesson seems clear: Majority white Americans need to develop a sense of solidarity and then act on their interests. This too was the lesson Solzhenitsyn drew from his experience in the Soviet gulag: “More compact or tribally-minded peoples managed to look out for one another in the harsh conditions of camp life, and so stood a better chance of survival.” Time is not on the side of traditional Americans, so let this be a minor wake up call. Are you willing to allow the Powers That Be to elect a new people and replace you? I know I’m not.